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Tapestry (episode)
After being attacked on an away mission, Picard dies and meets Q in the afterlife. Q offers Picard the chance to change a crucial moment in his history, prevent mistakes he made in life, but Picard learns that those mistakes are what made him who he is. Summary While attending a conference, Picard is shot in the center of the chest, causing his artificial heart to malfunction, rendering him clinically dead. In sickbay, as Dr. Crusher and her medical team try to save him, Picard has a near-death experience where Q appears as God, telling him he is indeed dead, and that they can now spend eternity together. Q explains that his artificial heart was the actual cause of his death, and that he may have lived with a real heart. Q gives Picard a chance to go back into time and choose not to fight the Nausicaans that caused the injury that made his bionic heart necessary, and return him to the present afterwards. Soon Picard is put back in time where he is fresh out of Starfleet Academy. He is waiting for his first assignment at Starbase Earhart with his two closest friends, Corey and Marta. After a Nausicaan cheats Corey in a game of dom-jot, he vows revenge. Initially Picard helped Corey, however, knowing that if he would help Corey, he would end up being stabbed through the heart, he now makes the decision to walk away from the fight, betraying his two friends. Picard is then returned to the present, where he is an assistant astrophysics officer on board the ''Enterprise''-D, a mere junior lieutenant with Worf as his immediate commander. He soon discovers from Commander Riker that he is not lined up for a promotion any time soon because he "just doesn't take risks" and "doesn't stand out." When Q returns, he explains that, although the injury nearly killed Picard, it also helped him realize how fragile life is, and thus made him more willing to take risks and make his mark on the universe. Picard asks him to let him reverse the changes he made, deciding that it was worth the recent incident to allow what originally happened to him to happen. Picard decides to die rather then live life as an average, dreary man. Q returns Picard back to the Bonestell Facility, just moments before the fight with the Nausicaans, now three of them. One of the Nausicaans insults Picard, and the fight beings. As Picard is run through by one of the Nausicaans, he begins to laugh, knowing history has been set right, and is shown again in the present, lying on the biobed he was placed on after his injury, laughing as he comes to, his bionic heart reactivated. Picard and Riker postulate afterward that the near-death experience was merely another test by Q, but does not speculate whether or not the injury was Q's work. But Picard states that whatever it was, he needs to thank Q for showing him how important his near-death experience was. Memorable Quotes "Welcome to the afterlife, Jean-Luc. You're dead." : - Q''' to Picard "Q, what is going on?" "I told you. You're dead, this is the afterlife, and I'm God." "You are not God!" "Blasphemy! You're lucky I don't cast you out or smite you or something." : - '''Picard and Q''' "I refuse to believe that the afterlife is run by you; the universe is not so badly designed." : - '''Picard, to Q "My only regret is having to die and finding you here." : - Picard, to Q "Change them? You mean change the past? Q, even if you have been able to bring me back to the past somehow, surely you must realize that any alteration in this timeline will have a profound impact on the future." "''Please! Spare me your egotistical musings on your pivotal role in history. Nothing you do here will cause the Federation to collapse or galaxies to explode. To be blunt, you're not that important." : - '''Picard' and Q''' "...it's a beautiful story. It gets you right here, doesn't it?" : - '''Q, pointing generally at his heart and mocking sympathy. :: (A pun on the fact that the story Picard tells ends with Picard being stabbed in the heart.) "Flowers! Is there a John-Luck Pickard here?" : - Q''' "... you should be happy! You have a real heart beating in your chest, and you get to live out the rest of your life in safety - running tests, making analyses, and carrying reports to your superiors." : - '''Q to Lieutenant Picard, explaining how dreary Picard's life has become without his near-death experience "If you want to get ahead, you have to take chances, stand out the crowd, get noticed!" : - Riker to Lieutenant Picard "Are you having a good laugh now, Q? Does it amuse you to think of me living out the rest of my life as a dreary man in a tedious job?" : - Picard, speaking alone, adressing Q "I can't live out my days as that person! That man is bereft of passion... and imagination! That is not who I am! ... I would rather die as the man I was than live the life I just saw." : - Picard to Q "The Jean-Luc Picard you wanted to be, the one who did not fight the Nausicaan, had quite a different career from the one you remember. That Picard never had a brush with death. Never came face to face with his own mortality. Never realised how fragile life is or how important each moment must be. So his life never came into focus. He drifted through much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assigment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves. He never led the away-team on Milika III to save the ambassador, or take charge of the Stargazers bridge, when its Captain was killed. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe - and he never, ever, got noticed by anyone!" : - Q''' to Picard "There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of... there were loose threads... untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads... it had unravelled the tapestry of my life." : - '''Picard to Riker "Coward, like all Starfleet you talk and you talk but you have no gromba." "What did you say?" "I said you are a coward." "Thats what I thought you said." : - A Nausicaan and Picard, right before the fight Background Information * Picard told Wesley Crusher the story of fighting with the Nausicaans and getting stabbed through the heart in the season 2 episode "Samaritan Snare". He said that, looking down at the knife, he "actually laughed out loud", which he took as a strange thing to do. When Q and Picard reviewed the incident at the beginning of the episode we see that he, indeed, did laugh after he was stabbed. At the end, when Picard restored history, we see that he was laughing because he was pleased that he had restored history. * This episode marks the first on-screen appearance of the Nausicaans. * LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge) does not appear on screen but has one brief voiceover line. * Ronald D. Moore called the story "one of the best things I wrote and one of TNG's finest episodes". http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6952/ron14.txt * Q's statement of "It gets ya right here doesn't it?" mirrors an identical line in TOS episode "The Changeling". * The Bonestell Recreation Facility on Starbase Earhart is named after artist and matte painter Chesley Bonestell. *Besides the pilot episode ("Encounter at Farpoint") and series finale ("All Good Things..."), this is the only Q episode of the series that does not have "Q" in the title. * The exact nature of time travel used in this episode is intentionally left ambiguous in light of the full spectrum of Q's powers and the incident that brought about the chain of events in the first place. As observed by Picard himself, Q's powers and ability to create isolated realms of existence introduce the possibility that time travel is precluded entirely, or the whole experience could merely be a hallucination precluding Picard from actually having even met Q at all in the episode. The lattermost theory is somewhat supported by the title itself; "Tapestry" is the only episode of Next Generation since the pilot Encounter at Farpoint and aside from the finale All Good Things... to feature Q without having the letter "Q" in the title, which could be seen as a suggestion that the appearance of Q is "not really there." Links and References Guest Stars *John de Lancie as Q *Ned Vaughn as Cortin Zweller *J.C. Brandy as Marta Batanides *Clint Carmichael as Nausicaan *Rae Norman as Penny Muroc *Clive Church as Maurice Picard *Marcus Nash as Young Picard *Michael Braveheart as Martinez (uncredited) References ''Ajax'', USS; Bonestell Recreation Facility; compressed teryon beam; dom-jot; Starbase Earhart; Halloway, Thomas; inaprovaline; isocortex; Lenarians; lieutenant junior grade; magna-spanner; Milika III; Morikin VII; Narth; Nausicaan; Nausicaan sword; Rigel; Selar; Stethoscope; teryon |next= }} Category:TNG episodes de:Willkommen im Leben nach dem Tode es:Tapestry nl:Tapestry